With Google+, uploading photos is done automatically

We were surprised to see the photos we just took with our smartphone were immediately available on Google+, a social network much like Facebook.

Google's new Instant Upload saves your photos and videos in a private space on Google+. Click the "share" button in Google+ to make them available to anyone, or limit viewing to your friends. If you don't already have Google+, you can get it at Plus.Google.com.

Google+ lets you upload an unlimited number of photos in standard size (2048 pixels); at full resolution it limits you to five gigabytes of storage, which is free. Video storage is unlimited for videos of 15 minutes or less. The default for photos is full resolution, but you can change that in the settings area.

Being able to send a photo from your Google+ account can be useful in an emergency, such as a violent encounter. The bad guy may think he destroyed the evidence when he stole your phone, but it's backed up online. (Take that, bad guy!) Or you may have accidentally deleted a photo of your future wife or husband. But it's ready to download again any time.

AOL Payout

A couple days ago, Joy found out her sister has been paying $40 a month for AOL's dial-up service. What a rip-off. She already has a high-speed Internet connection, and has had it for 15 years. Yet the charges went on and on. And this is just the tip of the payout iceberg. According to the latest AOL quarterly report, payments for dial-up services accounted for 70 percent of AOL's profit.

This is truly amazing, because only a handful of those connected to the Internet still use dial-up. The happy news for AOL is that people keep paying for this service even when they stop using it. Joy's sister, for example, thought she'd be disconnected if she didn't keep paying. She also assumed she would no longer get email. But AOL mail has been free since 2006.

Now she's so mad, she's switching to Yahoo.

This is reminiscent of other companies that became prisoners of their profit centers. Hewlett-Packard reached the point a few years ago when all of its profit came from selling printer ink. Instead of a high-tech company, they became an ink company. Kodak invented the digital camera but wouldn't turn that way because film was where they made their money. They lost focus.

App Happy

•BlackJet, a new app for iPhones, lists space-sharing opportunities in private jets. At present, it is available in 10 major cities. Check the list at their website, BlackJet.com. You need an invitation code to search for seats, but that's easy to get. Enter the code "COOLBLACKJET100" at Blackjet.com. Unfortunately, there's a membership fee of $2,500; seats tend to cost around $2,000 each, and that's just one way. They give you a companion ticket worth $1,750 when you book your first flight, to soften the blow. If you don't have an iPhone you can just go to the website.

•Skit from SkitApp.com for iPads (iPad 2 and up) makes it easy to create animations with your photos. Start with a friend's photo or anybody's, and use your finger to erase the body. Plop the head on an alien body and have another arrive by spaceship. Once you share the app, the recipient can edit the story to make it their own.

The Numbers Report

•In 10 years, the average home with two teenagers will have 50 devices connected to the Internet, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation. We counted 13 in our home. That's only three more than the national average. But we've yet to connect our washer and dryer, our plants or our posture to an Internet app. (Some people have!)

•Jobs related to Android phones shot up 20 percent in the first quarter of 2013, compared to 11 percent for iPad and 5 percent for iPhone-related jobs, according to Freelancer.com. Email marketing jobs are up 21 percent and business process outsourcing or BPO jobs — jargon for jobs like handling tech support or accounting — are up 113 percent.

Internuts

Nextdoor.com is a site to help you keep up with what's going on in your neighborhood. Information categories include "crime and safety," "classifieds," "free items," and "lost and found." They verify you are you by sending an automated phone call. We got welcomed by neighbors when we tried it. If there isn't a category for gossip, there soon will be.

Another Warning

A reader asked us if he should have his computer registry cleaned. A pop-up on a website wanted to charge him $129 for this service. Back away, we said.

Registries don't get dirty and don't need cleaning. Cleaning the registry is a common scam. Many times when you go to a site to download a program, that site will have links to something you don't need. Often you have to actively uncheck some box on the screen to avoid being sent somewhere you don't want to go. Besides registry cleaning, you'll often see warnings about flash software, viruses and spyware. Stay with what you want to do, which is get the program you came for, and ignore all the bogus offers.

Flash Drive Duplicator

Flash drives are cheap these days — around $15 for 16 gigabytes — which is a lot of storage. We tend to back up everything on them. But what if something goes wrong with that drive and it just doesn't "flash" anymore, so to speak? We better have it backed up somewhere else.

The obvious way to go is to drag and drop files from one drive to another using Windows Explorer, (File Explorer in Windows 8). Or you can upload the files to your private storage space on the Internet using Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud and any of several other services.

But this is slow going if you have a lot of files to copy. A $212 hardware alternative is Startech's Flash Drive Duplicator. We think it's over-priced but it's lightning fast. Plug three drives into the duplicator and everything on the first drive is copied onto the second and third in seconds. What we didn't know when we tried it recently is that everything on the second or third drive got wiped out. So be sure you copy your stuff onto empty drives. This is basically an extension of disk duplicating devices, which have been around for many years.